Land struggles and working people

The dominant convention in critical agrarian studies, as well as among agrarian movements, is that struggles for land are best captured by the framework of agrarian reform that seeks to expropriate land from large private monopolies for redistribution to landless and near-landless working classes, with the aim of building a dynamic agricultural sector. This perspective originates in classical agrarian studies, which locates the land issue within the context of agriculture’s contribution to capitalist industrial development. This type of land struggle remains important today, but it does not fully capture the range of the land struggles of working people across rural and urban, agricultural and nonagricultural spaces and sectors. Recent decades have seen the fragmentation of working classes, as the ranks of those who combine various types of agricultural/nonagricultural, rural/urban livelihoods have vastly expanded. As a result, the land struggles of working people have become decentered from the classical treatment in relation to agriculture and capitalism. This chapter argues that land struggles of working people today are dispersed and multisited, polycentric in political leadership and power, and multiscalar, but this does not make them less important compared to their counterparts in the twentieth century. The current global conjuncture makes them profoundly important as they are.